All posts tagged gm

One very respectable newspaper here in Poland picked up our Jan Hromadko’s story this morning that said the German government may agree to GM holding on to Opel. The paper went on to explain how GM may ask for 1 billion euro from the UK, Spain and Poland to help restructure Opel, and mentioned that Poland would need to pay 100 million euro.

Since the Polish government has not yet received any request from GM, it also doesn’t say how much Poland would need to pay to keep Opel’s Polish manufacturing operations alive, so where does the figure come from? And why not 50 million or 300 million? We don’t know and the daily doesn’t tell us.

But we can guess – the daily says Britain can come up with 550 million, so I assume the daily thinks that leaves 450 million for Spain and Poland. There are 7,000 Opel employees in Spain and almost 3,000 in Poland, and 30% of 450 million is 135 million – and that’s “around” 100 million.

So the reality is: we don’t know, they don’t know, and nobody knows. Except for the thousands of people who read the article this morning and now think they know it’s going to be 100 million euro. Read More »

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